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Piwik adds log file analysis capabilities

The creators of the open source Piwik web analytics software have announced the availability of a new server log import feature for their software. The creation of the new feature was prompted by the fact that Google has discontinued the Urchin Web Analytics product.

Urchin Software Corporation was acquired by Google in 2005 and the company's hosted analytics solution became the Google Analytics product. Google continued to sell licences to the locally installable version of Urchin which allowed users to analyse their web server logs instead of using a JavaScript snippet to track visitors. This local version of the product was discontinued at the end of last month.

The Piwik developers have now provided a Python script that allows users to import server logs into their software. The script requires no setup and can easily be executed as a cron job or a scheduled task on Windows. According to the developers, "the script is optimized and can parse and import hundreds of log lines per second." The new feature is available in development versions of Piwik from version 1.7.2-rc2 onwards.

Piwik aims to be an open source, self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics. According to the project's site, it is already used by more than 200,000 web sites around the world. It can be downloaded from the project's web site under the terms of the GPLv3. The latest stable release of Piwik is version 1.7.1. An online demonstration of the software is also available.